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Samuel R. Delany

This past weekend at Readercon was filled with great conversations, superb author readings, interesting panels and the inevitable hijinx. I’m still going through pictures that folks have sent me of my readings, panels and friendly gatherings. Here are a few.

For my solo reading, I shared a portion of a recently completed novelette "Beyond Our Hidden Stars" (photo by David Stokes)

I’m very much looking forward to attending Readercon this week. The drive up to Quincy, Massachusetts will be great — with Samuel R. Delany and Dennis Rickett. However, we’ll miss Tom Purdom who won’t be joining us this year, and especially Gardner Dozois who has left this earth. Then, we’ll have a weekend dedicated hanging with friends (old and new) as well as interesting conversations, panels, author readings and opportunities to learn from each other.

If you’ll be in Quincy, Massachusetts for the conference, here’s my schedule:

The Atheist in the Attic is a “fictive reconstruction” of a meeting between the philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Baruch de Spinoza, told from Leibniz’s point of view. An intriguing read, it sent my mind in a variety of different direction. At one point, I took a discussion of the differences between a poet and a philosopher and considered how it might apply to different kinds of novelists. I’ve decided that I’m essentially a philosopher; no surprise there. As I wrote in the essay, “I write to understand. My characters and plots are formed in a subconscious that churns with confusion or concern about how the world functions (or fails to function). As I write the story my characters tell me, I find myself posing questions that [as Delany wrote in The Atheist in the Attic] “reflect and even explain the differences and forces that relate them all… hold them together… or tear them apart.”

Please read the essay here, and let me know what you think. What kinds of authors do you prefer to read — poets or philosophers, as defined by Delany’s book? And if you’re a writer, are you a poet or philosopher… or something else?